Integrating Scheduling of Logistic Support Processes in Agent-Based Industry 4.0 Assembly Simulation

The upcoming decentralized production systems seem to be promising in Industry 4.0 assembly to handle the challenges of highly individual products. Matrix production characterized by freely linked workstations and an advanced automation level are highly flexible. That is why many efforts have already been made to explore the advantages compared to existing flow shop production systems, but also the additional challenges arising from this new paradigm. One of these challenges is the synchronization of main product and supply part flow at the individual workstations during order scheduling. This paper presents a new approach of integrating logistics support processes into the scheduling of the main product flow to consider the part supply in the decisions taken during scheduling avoiding waiting times. We compare our integrated approach with the existing decoupled scheduling approach, based on a "bicycle assembly" scenario. The results are promising particularly when part supply is a bottleneck.